Debugging diffusion of responsibility

Recently I learned a new term: diffusion of responsibility and this made me want to do a case study in the space of engineering management of problem identification, analysis, and potential solutions.

Problem and symptoms

Diffusion of responsibility is a sociopsychological phenomenon whereby a person is less likely to take responsibility for action or inaction when other bystanders or witnesses are present. Symptoms include: people only takes responsibilities for tasks that are specifically assigned to them; one do not take responsibilities for tasks that are part of their job in a group setting.

Why

Possible contributors:

1. Does the symptom only happen to certain tasks? e.g., the tasks don’t need to happen but people are unwilling to say “No”(may overlap with capacity); tasks needs to be done, but no one wants to do, it is boring, tedious and busy work(overlap with risk/reward, not enough motivation); tasks needs to be done, but it requires specific skills or expertise to do
2. Capacity, e.g., no additional capacity to take on additional scope of the work
3. Role perception, e.g., misalignment as in this task is not part of my job
4. Team culture, e.g., there are people used to fill the gaps feel tired to do so again; risk/reward imbalance(I would like to do but not willing to take risks because of unknown impact); imposter syndrome(someone will do this better than I do)

Potential Solutions

1. Prioritized tasks determined by structured (metric based) decision making: What are the options, brainstorming, set constraints, raise blockers, test options, analyze and make decision.
2. Build in slack.
3. Get alignment and set expectation on role perception.
4. Cultivate team culture to have shared accountability via closer collaboration(I identified this problem, and I need suggestions from someone else to help me to come up with a better solution). Safe space to make mistakes, supportive environment to learn new things, reward behaviors better to the team/organization(Global optimization over local optimization).